Search This Blog

Anti-anti-opera?

Attended a performance last night of Le Grand Macabre at the Barbican, London. An immensely good performance and riveting from start to finish. It was great to have the London Symphony Orchestra on stage, which meant we could relish the score's fabulous textures which bristled and shimmered and hooted and blasted and everything in between. Simon Rattle was magisterial, of course.
We were treated to a micro-staging by Peter Sellars which was confined by lack of space and sets but this wasn't really an excuse for limiting the props to lab coats, desks, laptops and a hospital bed which don't really belong in Breughelland; a constant video backdrop was even less relevant, displaying images from the Chernobyl disaster. Nothing we were looking at complemented the bizarre fantasies of the plot. Rather than entering a new universe, we found ourselves in a nuclear conference, albeit with some weird characters in attendance.
Ligeti created a 'flea-market' of a musical score, one that would constitute an opera after the death of the genre. After all, his generation was somewhat obsessed with opera's demise: Kagel, Stockhausen, Boulez, the latter intent at one time upon burning down opera houses.
But if, as Ligeti said, the idea was to create an anti-anti-opera - wouldn't you achieve that by writing an opera?
Rather than 'bombing out' the acoutrements of the genre which anti-operas try to do, an anti-anti-opera should surely turn ur-opera on its head.

As one of those who vaguely remember the role of the Lord Chamberlain and, subsequently, Mary Whitehouse, I reject censorship of any kind and would defend the right of any artist to show anything on stage regardless of its reception by any part of the community. That seems to me to be an over-riding principle. If pressure groups or individuals succeed in blocking something that’s not to their taste - that’s censorship. This isn’t real politics here - it’s the stage. Dissenters' voices can be heard, certainly, but they must be tolerant. Audiences can vote with their feet.

However, the problem here seems to have been exacerbated by the fact that MTW tried to capitalise on their contention that th…

A browse through previous concerts by Newbury Chamber Choir is revealing. Its members have contributed their share of Handel and Vivaldi, Mozart and Brahms. But what intrigues its eye-catching less familiar repertoire. Newbury’s capable, well-tuned choir prides itself on including music undeservingly overlooked. They have engaged with beguiling medieval Play (Opera) of Daniel, reaching back to the 13th century. The early Baroque yielded Carissimi’s oratorio Jonas; and from a generation later the Missa Dolorosa of Venices’s Antonio Caldara (which is also featured on 25th March at St. Lawrence, Eastcote, Middlesex by the Sine Nomine Singers: www.sinenomine.org.uk) Newbury has shone light on two composers who achieved a kind of ‘first’: introducing sacred concertos by Giovanni Paolo Cima (1570-1622), a Monteverdi contemporary credited with inventing the trio-sonata; and more crucially, the choral work Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (1600), by the slightly older Emilio de’ Ca…

For The Butterfly's Spell, I wanted an interlude in between the two acts, and used this famous ballad, in my own translation. Here are some other translations that I looked at; most of them I thought almost as incomprehensible in English as the Spanish original. I'm sorry to have lost the attributions.